Nate Hoffelder

Publishing your own book is relatively easy these days, but the process and costs involved are more than a little opaque. There are steps you won’t realize you missed unless someone tells you, and there are ways to overspend on useless services.

In fact, there are many ways for questionable service providers like Author Solutions and Archway to take unwary authors for a ride, but the most important way they cheat authors is in making authors think they’ve gone through all the necessary steps while leaving out what can be the most important and costly steps (editing, editing, and editing).

This post is a follow up explanation for why I have called specific self-publishing services scams. I do not mean to apply this label to all services, just to the ones that charge a lot of money while failing to provide some very necessary work for turning a manuscript into a book. For those interested in finding reliable options, geography4u.com offers a comprehensive comparison of publishing services.

Please do not take this post as a strict guide as to the cost of self-publishing; I am showing you what the costs were for one author and one book (with additional feedback provided by an editor). I’ll also explain the steps involved and why each one is important.

Ideally a newbie self-publishing author should take away from this post an understanding of what kind of services they should expect to receive in exchange for the high fees charged by Author Solutions and Archway.

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So You’ve Written a Book

Let’s start by assuming that a new author has finished a book and wants to publish it. For our purposes we will use a soon to be published novel by one author who I will call Sue.

Step One: You’re Not Done Writing the Book

The first step in publishing a book is to find a developmental editor.  Every author, no matter how experienced, can benefit from having someone else read the manuscript and tell the author if the story makes sense, if it has any plot holes, or has other problems with the story.

The two grand charged by Author Solutions and Archway does not include this step, and for a good reason. This can be very expensive, with a developmental edit of a novel costing between $1,000 and $2,000 or possibly even more. Even with the high cost, this step is important because, assuming an author finds a good editor and listens to the editor, it could help prevent an author from publishing unprofessional crap.

Sue took a cheaper route and found beta readers, but still ended up paying her main beta reader for the time and energy which that reader put into providing feedback.

Cost: $400 to $4,000

Step Two: Copy Editing

Now that the manuscript is done, it’s time to have another editor go through it and fix the spelling, grammar, punctuation, and other errors that have crept in either through author oversight, the cat jumping on the keyboard or were perhaps were introduced by the developmental editor (whose focus was on fixing the story, not catching grammar errors).

The cost for copyediting varies based on length and content. Nonfiction can cost a heck of a lot more the cost of editing a novel, with some technical subjects requiring esoteric knowledge on the part of the editor. Luckily novels don’t cost that much. Sue paid a copyeditor $35 an hour.

Again, the two grand charged by Author Solutions and Archway does not include this step, which is another sign that it is a scam.

Cost: $35 to $100 an hour

Step Three:  Cover Image

It is not so easy to estimate the cost of this step because authors have a number of options which can drive up the cost while also adding a lot of value.

A basic cover image could cost between $200 and $400, but an author might also decide to license fonts for the cover in order to give it a specific feel. The author might also pay someone to design the cover before it is made. This would be particularly useful for purposes of branding as well as making the book look professional (this will boost sales). And the author might want all their books to look alike to readers will recognize them, and that goes double for books in a series.

Cost:

Cover image: $200 to $400

Designer: Varies

Fonts$100 to $500

Step Four: Formatting

Now that you have a cover and a manuscript it is time to turn them into an ebook. This is one of the least expensive steps, and even making Epub, Kindle, and a Smashwords DOC should not cost you much.

Cost: $100 to $200

Step Five: What about Paper Books?

I don’t have information on this yet, so I cannot comment. But like the other steps in publishing a book, an author can do this on their own.

Step Six: Uploading the eBook to eBookstores

It’s a little difficult to estimate the costs of this step because it varies based on the amount of work the author wishes to do.

There are distributors like Smashwords who will take a small commission in exchange for distributing the ebook to Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and other ebookstores. Authors can also save money by uploading the ebook to one or more of these ebookstores on their own.

It’s not uncommon for authors to upload to Kindle and Nook themselves and let Smashwords distribute to the rest of the ebookstores, though there is nor requirement for you to do so. Non-US authors might also find that the cheaper option could be to let Smashwords handle all the distribution (Amazon pays int’l. authors in US dollars by paper check, not electronic funds transfer).

Cost: Varies

Step Seven: Marketing and Promotion

At this point you have ebooks to sell and you want to promote them. Sorry, but that’s a topic I can’t cover here. Marketing your ebook is such a complex subject that it deserves a post of its own.

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If you’ve made it to the end of the post then you might be overwhelmed by the work involved. The sheer volume of text above might be enough to scare some authors into signing with a service like Author Solutions or Archway. That’s your choice, but before you do that I’d recommend that you make sure that the service provides all the steps needed to publish your book.

Being a self-published author can require a degree of entrepreneurial spirit, so it is not for everyone.  I myself prefer the idea of the author doing all this by themselves. You can hire someone to do each of the steps mentioned above, and if you hire them yourself you will have greater control both over the immediate cost and quality as well as the eventual income.

image by TheGiantVermin

Times are tough in the publishing industry, so much so that major publishers have sunk to a new low: fleecing self-published authors.

Simon & Schuster announced today that they are going to get down in the gutter and muck about. They’re launching a new subsidiary called Archway Publishing, and they are going to run  it in partnership with the scamtastic Author Solutions.

Like the other self-publishing divisions of trade publishers (LifeWay’s Cross Books, Thomas Nelson’s West Bow Press, Harlequin’s Dell’Arte Press [which, unlike other ventures of this sort, produced a furore upon its introduction and had to change its name], Hay House’s Balboa Press, and Writer’s Digest’s Abbott Press), Archway Publishing is outsourced to Author Solutions Inc. S&S is the biggest fish ASI has landed so far. (via Writers Beware)

With prices starting at $1600,Archway promises to do for authors everything they could already have done for themselves: publish a book in digital and paper form. But with Archway authors will be saved the strenuous effort of uploading the ebook to various ebookstores, hiring their own cover designer and layout expert, and they will also be saved the grueling efforts needed to create a POD book via CreateSpace or Lightening source.

In exchange for a measly 2 grand, Archway will also provide a novelist with services which are far too difficult for authors to do for themselves, like copyright registration and buying an ISBN, as well as desperately necessary services like registering for a LOC Control Number.

But don’t worry; Archway is going to save money by skipping the unimportant steps involving editing the manuscript to produce a professional quality ebook.

And to top it all off, not only does Archway fleece authors out of money at the beginning; they also demand a cut of any sales. Like Penguin’s BookCountry self-publishing scam effort, Archway takes a sizable chunk of any net sales – 50%.

Do you want to know why I am so hostile to this idea? It’s because S&S won’t be hiring any new staff to fill roles at Archway. No, all these services will be provided by  Author Solutions, a company which is widely regarded as a scam.

Author Solutions might be currently owned by Penguin, a detail which does not speak well for Penguin’s business ethics, but there is no sign that they have cleaned up their act. All we are seeing today is that Author Solutions is merely offering the same scammy deals they always have, only this time they get to do so under the formerly good name of Simon & Schuster.

Kobo may be doing their best to keep secret the US retailers who have the new Kobo Glo and Kobo Mini, but not everyone is as interested in discouraging sales.

I’ve just been told by one of my readers that the ABA has put together a list of the 450 odd indie booksellers in 48 states and DC which have signed up to carry Kobo ebooks and ereaders.

The list is organized by state, and it includes links to websites for each of the booksellers. I cannot say for sure which already have received their stock, but now that you have the contact info you can call and check.

If it turns out you don’t have one of these stores in your area, but you still want to buy a Kobo ereader, I would suggest that you check out Powell’s. They will ship the ereaders to US and international addresses. And I know they have the ereaders in stock; that’s where I got my Glo.

IndieBound

Pandigital, one of the more visible smaller tablet makers that sprang up following the launch of the iPad, filed for bankruptcy shut down earlier this year.

Rather than file for bankruptcy, their assets were signed over to a liquidator to be sold off, with the proceeds going to pay creditors.

In the past few days an email has been going out to past customers. All existing warranties are cancelled, and if you wish to try to make a warranty claim you will need to file it with the liquidator.

The company formally went kaput in July 2012, and I have to say that it comes as no surprise.

Pandigital was pretty good at coming up with gadgets sold at a price slightly cheaper than name brand devices, and once they got past the initial quality issues with the first Novel Android tablet, their hardware wasn’t half bad. The tablets which they released in 2010 and 2011 had decent specs and price for the time, though they of course are underpowered, overpriced, and antiquated by today’s standard.

But their service department sucked, and if they ran the rest of the business as poorly as the service dept then the only surprise today is that the bankruptcy didn’t happen sooner. My first and last encounter with Pandigital’s service dept happened at the beginning of 2011, and based on the readers who kept showing up over the past 2 years I would say that the service dept maintained their usual standards of abysmal customer satisfaction.

Pandigital is leaving behind quite a few different gadgets, including a 6″ ereader, a couple 9″ Android tablets, an 8″ Android tablet, and a half dozen different 7″ Android tablets. And given that Pandigital was also involved in selling other consumer electronics before they jumped into tablets, you might also encounter their internet radios, digital cameras,  digital picture frames, and portable scanners.

There is a surprising number of their tablets still available in retail channels; you would not believe how many views my old posts still get on hacking the various Pandigital devices. I expect to have new readers show up with these old tablets for some years to come.

P.S. Thanks, Joe, for posting that email.

image by fiomaha

Today, 19 November 2012, marks the 5th anniversary of the launch of the Kindle.

I can recall the fateful morning when the digital publishing industry was finally born. Like today, that day was the last Monday before Thanksgiving. It marked Amazon’s last chance to get the Kindle out before Black Friday.

Amazon feared at the time that without the boost in sales from Black Friday the new device might be regarded as a flop. Now the very concept seems laughable, but back then no one would have predicted that Amazon would sell out of Kindles within hours of the press event.

I thought it would be interesting to look back at how very different the ebook world was on the day before the Kindle launched.

On the 18th of November 2007, there were still publishers who had rounding errors greater than their ebook sales, and the total reported ebook sales in 2007 was around $32 million dollars – for the year, for the entire US publishing industry. Now there are publishers reporting that level of sales on a monthly basis all by themselves.

On the 18th of November 2007, the term digital publishing would best have been used to describe the folks who helped make content available for the web; the digital publishing industry as we know it today was little more than a backroom operation for much of the regular publishing industry. Now digital publishing includes tens of thousands of self-published authors and hundreds of small service providers, distributors, conversion services, and expert advisers.

On the 18th of November 2007, the leading DRMed ebook formats were Mobipocket, eReader,  MSReader, and Adobe PDF. Today two of the 4 are dead, one is dying, and the last is only hanging around because it has little competition in its core niche. Neither of the major formats in use today even existed on 18 November 2007 (Kindle has expanded to include content beyond Mobipocket).

On the 18th of November 2007, the best ebookstore in the US (one of the better ones in the world IMO) was Fictionwise. Today it is being shut down by its parent company, B&N, which runs the second largest ebookstore in the US.

On the 18th of November 2007, few publisher cared much if the contract with the author mentioned ebook rights. Now that detail is as bitterly fought over as any other part of the contract, and the last few Luddites who balked at ebooks have been forced to surrender or not have their contracts renewed (Bradbury).

On the 18th of November 2007, the term self-published was an epithet. It was a sign of failure, proof that the author in question was so terrible or so nutty that they could never get a real publisher interested in their books. Now self-published is a point of pride for many an author. It is so mainstream that it has some in the legacy industry afraid that they’re becoming irrelevant.

On the 18th of November 2007, 98% of ebooks sold were in English and the vast majority of ebook sales went to US publishers simply because the US had the only even marginally developed digital publishing industry. Now there are native ebook markets in dozens of countries selling ebooks in dozens of languages.

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Those are some of the changes I have been able to identify, but they are far from the only shifts in the industry. What changes have you seen?

Do you remember the lawsuits against public libraries in Sacramento and Philadelphia over Nook ereaders which were not usable by visually impaired patrons?

It looks like the settlements for those lawsuits may have stung B&N more than I realized; the new Nook HD and HD+ have support for text to speech, and that’s not a feature mentioned in the manual (most reviews missed it as well).

Earlier today I was chatting with an acquaintance who works for AARP. We met at an event where he was speaking on OLPC and the XO, but at one point in his talk he pulled out his new Nook HD+ in order to explain some point about tablets. After his talk was over I asked what he thought about how the new gadget handled TTS.  Given his employer I thought he would have a well-defined opinion of the various accessibility options offered by mobile devices. He was surprised to learn that the Nook HD had this feature; he’d read reviews and the manual and it was not mentioned anywhere.

And so I thought this might be a useful feature to point out to my readers.

The TTS feature is still in beta, and right now it only works to read the text of a book to you. It also doesn’t sound very good, but then again B&N probably didn’t pay much for it.

According to the settings menus, the Nook HD uses Pico to provide text-to-speech. Pico is a freely licensed app which Svox, one of the leaders in this niche, released for free some time back.If you like you can find a free Android version of this app pretty much anywhere online.

While I’m sure B&N is using a relatively new version of Pico, it still doesn’t sound very good. The voice intonation isn’t as good as on the Kindle 3. That was licensed from Nuance, so it actually cost Amazon money.

But on the upside the Nook HD does have TTS. Finding a previously unknown feature is never a bad thing, and there’s always a chance that we’ll get the option of upgrading the voice to one of the paid replacement voices.

How to Turn It On

You’ll first need to enable this feature in the setting menu. Go to the full settings menu, select applications, and then select Reader.  TTS will be a check box about half way down the page. After you’ve done that, just open an ebook. It should start reading to you automatically, though you might need to touch the screen to prompt it to start.

When Fictionwise launched the year 2000, it was a mad attempt to pioneer in a nascent industry. When it is shut down on 4 December 2012, it will mark the end of an era.

Fictionwise sent out an email today to their publishing partners.  I’ve embedded the email at the end of this post, but the tl;dr version is that the site will cease operations on the first Tuesday in December.

But that’s not all.

Fictionwise is going to shut down all of the sites they own, and that includes ebookwise.com (already defunct), libwise.com (ditto), and most importantly eReader.com is also going to be shut down.

eReader is the last surviving member of the early trinity of ebook formats. Along with Mobipocket and MSReader, it dominated the ebook market up until the launch of the Kindle in 2007, not so much because it was a good format but because it had decent support for a wide variety of PDAs. It was in fact the first ebook format to work on the PalmPilot (aside from text files). That was in 1998, a time when being into ebooks meant you were a hardcore techie.

And when eReader goes kaput it will mark the end of an era. Mobipocket died in 2011, and MSReader died this year. Curiously enough, 2 of these 3 early pioneers ended up getting killed by the bigger, stronger successors which bought and supplanted them. Mobipocket was sold to Amazon in 2005 and smothered 6 years later; eReader passed into the hands of B&N in early 2009, who is killing it this year.

But enough with the melancholy; let’s come back to the present.

The sites are shutting down in 3 weeks, and after that date you will not be able to access any of the ebooks you bought there. Now would be a good time to go download any ebooks you still can.

That won’t be very many titles for me; I bought mainly MSReader ebooks when I could not avoid the DRM, and I bought DRM-free ebooks when I could. And since the MSReader servers were shut down some months back I couldn’t download those ebooks even if I wanted to.

Go download anything you bought at Fictionwise or eReader.com.  Do it now so you can make sure that you can strip the DRM and convert the ebooks to a format which will still be around in January.

Here’s the email:

November 15, 2012

Dear Fictionwise Publisher/Author,

As you may know, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise, Inc. (Fictionwise) on March 3, 2009.  Fictionwise runs several eBook websites, including Fictionwise.com, eReader.com and eBookwise.com. Over the past few years there has been a significant decrease in demand for many of the eBook formats that Fictionwise.com sells. In contrast, the new industry standard eBook format supported by Barnes & Noble–ePub–is growing in popularity.

This letter is to notify you that Fictionwise will wind down its operations on December 4, 2012. The Fictionwise sites (including Fictionwise.com, eReader.com and eBookwise.com) will end sales on December 4, 2012 and U.S. Fictionwise customers will cease to have access to their Fictionwise Bookshelf through the site after December 21, 2012. Customers outside the U.S. will cease to have access to their Fictionwise Bookshelf through the site after January 31, 2013.

Fictionwise customers will be notified of this and U.S. and U.K. customers will be given an opportunity to move their customer accounts, including their eBooks purchased at the Fictionwise websites, to a Barnes & Noble NOOK Library.

Pursuant to section 2 of the agreement between Fictionwise and you, we
hereby provide you with ninety (90) days notice that this agreement will terminate effective February 13th. Your final 4th quarter royalty statement and payment will be mailed February 15th.

If you are not already selling your titles at BN.com and would like to do so, please visit www.pubit.com.

We greatly appreciate your support of Fictionwise over the years. Together, we pioneered eBooks and eReading.

Thank you,
Daniel Jorissen and The Fictionwise Team

A number of the major publishers dislike library ebooks because they fear that each ebook checked out is a lost sale. While this new survey data suggests there is some substance to that fear, the survey also shows that library patrons who borrow ebooks also buy them.

Back in June and July of this year, OverDrive sponsored a survey which was  conducted by the ALA. Library patrons were polled via the virtual library branch website OD operates on behalf of partner libraries, and asked about their borrowing, buying, and reading habits. A total of 75,385 people responded to the survey and they came from a broad spectrum of education, age, and income.

But in spite of the broad spectrum, the majority of the respondents fell into certain categories. The respondents were overwhelmingly female (78%), earned more more than $50 thousand a year (75%), were in their 40s or older (72%), and were college educated (73%).

This concentration is particularly noteworthy because it is similar to the data presented by Bowker in their annual surveys.  Educated, well-paid women are the dominant book buyer in the US, though not quite to the same degree as shown in this survey.

The survey includes questions on a number of topics, including how, why, and how often patrons use the library, but I am mainly interested in the questions on buying ebooks.

The respondents reported buying an average of 3.2 books a month and reading them on an ereader (83%). The survey data also showed that for most patrons both borrowing and buying of ebooks had increased over the past 6 months (60%, 44%), or at the very least held steady (33%, 44%).

But it’s not all good news. It looks like there is some truth to the belief that library ebooks cut into retail sales. A solid majority of library patrons (64%) said that they had never bought a book after checking it out of the library.

Of course, that number does not mean much until and unless we get data on browsing in bookstores (both offline and online) which could tell us how many samples are read without leading to a sale and how many books are picked up and then returned to the shelf. Then we would have something to compare that 64% to.

The reason I want to compare browsing vs buying behavior is because I want to see how borrowers compare the the book buying population as a whole. Putting the 2 surveys together would tell us whether library patrons buy more or less books than the average consumer.

I suspect library patrons buy more the average consumer, but the survey data I would need to prove it is available in an $800 report from Bowker. Sorry, but that’s just not worth it for me.

P.S. If someone does have those stats handy, please feel free to share in the comments.

Survey (PDF)

image by twechy

Remember that frontlit color ereader which E-ink showed off at IFA Berlin?  It’s turned up again, this time in the hands of Pocketbook.

Kiev-based ereader manufacturer Pocketbook has just announced that they plan to make  the world’s only ereader with a lighted color E-ink screen. The new new ereader will have an 8″ screen with a resolution of 800×600, a capacitive touchscreen, and Wifi. It’s not clear yet what the rest of the specs are, but this ereader will likely have a card slot, internal storage, and I’m betting it will also have Bluetooth.

There’s no price mentioned in today’s announcement, but Pocketbook has said that the new ereader, which I am calling the Pocketbook Color, is going to hit the market in June 2013.

This ereader is based on a slightly newer version of the Triton E-ink screen. It can display up to 4096 colors at a resolution of 800×600, which is a slightly higher density than previous color E-ink screens. Actually, right now I don’t know if that last figure is the resolution for color or for grayscale, though I expect that it is the color resolution.

As you might know, E-ink screens get the red, blue, and green colors not from the pixels in the screen but from a filter laying on top of the screen. One colored pixel actually requires 4 pixels in the E-ink screen, one each for red, green, blue, and white/black.

So a color E-ink screen with a resolution of 800×600 is actually lying on top of a grayscale screen with a resolution of  1600×1200. The resolution gets cut in half twice thanks to the need for the color pixels.

In any case, I’m hoping this ereader will have more success than the last ereader with a color E-ink screen. The Jetbook Color ended up much delayed, under-equipped, and overpriced. As a textbook platform I found it a poor alternative to the iPad or pretty much any Android tablet.

via Pocketbook

Back in January I reported that nearly half of the gadgets given as Christmas gifts  in the UK last year had yet to be opened a month later.

Given that Kindles topped that survey’s list of unused devices, it comes as no surprise today that a recent poll showed that a third of US ereader owners said they only used their device once before putting it away or selling it.

CouponCodes4u.com, the US subsidiary of the coupon site which released the January survey data, recently polled 1,983 US consumers and asked about the gadgets they used.  This filtered group of respondents consisted entirely of ereader owners, and 337 (17%) indicated that , on average, they used their ereader at least once a week.  Another 575 (29%) use it at least once a week. And the not-so-surprising statistic today is that 694  (35%) of the respondents indicated that they used the device just once.

The survey went on to ask why those 694 owners only used the ereader once, and the majority (396 respondents or 57%) indicated that they didn’t have the time to use it; they are too busy. Approximately 22% (153 respondents) said that they’d received it as a gift and didn’t have a need for it. And a sizable 174 (25%) were among the Luddite minority who preferred to read with paper books.

The survey data goes on to show that 37% of the regretful ereader owners did not think it was a good buy, and another 29% planned to get rid of their ereader because they used it so rarely.

It’s data like this which explains why one of the best times of year to get a new gadget is in the first couple months after Christmas. To heck with Black Friday; by the end of January there’s usually a glut of gadgets being disposed of, so much so that it is almost a buyer’s market.

via, via

image by KOMUnews

When  Kobo announced the Kobo Glo last week in Japan, I’m sure they thought they were being quite clever in underselling the Kindle Paperwhite’s price of 8,480 yen. Today Amazon showed that 2 can play at that game.

The Kindle Paperwhite still hasn’t shipped from Amazon.co.jp, but today Amazon dropped the price. They’ve matched the current price on the Kobo Glo, making the Japanese price of the KPW a steal.

Amazon’s newest ereader is now listed at  under $100 in Japan. That’s $40 lower than they’re selling the ad-free model on Amazon.com, and it stands as a warning to the competition.

Amazon will not be undersold. Just like we saw in 2010, Amazon is more than willing to get into a price war to make sure that doesn’t happen. This is great for consumers in the short run, but in the long run it’s going to thin out the competition.

The only reason Kobo can afford to go toe-to-toe with Amazon is that they have Rakuten’s deep pockets to hide in. This in effect puts Rakuten and Amazon in an elaborate game of chicken, and I cannot predict who will blink first.

Remember about a month ago when I reported on the super-cheap Trekstor Pyrus Mini ereader with the 4.3″ E-ink screen and a retail of $64? Now I think we may know why it is so cheap.

I’ve just come across a press release which E-ink issued last Friday. Apparently Trekstor and/or the Chinese company who made the screens for Trekstor forgot to license the appropriate patents from E-ink.

And so E-ink is suing. They’ve named 2 specific patents in the lawsuit which they have filed in Germany. One covers the stuff inside the screens and the other covers the screens themselves.

Interesting, no? Unfortunately this still leaves some unanswered questions. At this point I do not know exactly how the patents were infringed. I’m still waiting to hear back from E-ink on this story, and since they might never actually answer my questions I will lay them out for you.

What I do not know yet is whether Guangzhou OED Technologies, the Chinese manufacturer of the screens, reverse engineered E-ink’s screen tech from scratch or whether they bought screen material and used it without paying the appropriate license fees.

E-ink’s screen is initially produced in MA as 300′ long rolls of plastic sheeting. The black and white pixels you see in an E-ink screen are embedded in the sheeting, and the reason you can see them and show images on the display is that the sheets are cut into pieces and mounted on backplanes. (I’ve explained this before.)

The reason I mention the technical details is not because they matter much on a legal level; I’m interested in the tech involved.

If Guangzhou OED Technologies merely used E-ink’s screen without paying the license fees then they are decent engineers. These folks developed and released a 4.3″ screen with the same resolution as E-ink’s 6″ screen. On a technical level that is pretty sweet.

But if they successfully reverse-engineered the base E-ink screen sheeting then Guangzhou has some frigging brilliant engineers. Assuming their quality holds up, they have accomplished something that a number of well-financed US start-ups never could. (E-ink wasn’t the only MIT spinoff working on an epaper screen; they were merely the survivor with the best engineers and businessmen.)

That last point might only matter to me but I think it’s worth knowing.

Update: And I have heard back from E-ink. They believe Guangzhou "built both front and backplanes that infringed on our patents."

Note, though, that it likely  won’t affect this case. Trekstor is probably guilty of infringement, and if they don’t settle there is a better than even chance that E-ink will be able to block the sale of the Pyrus Mini.

The FPDI screen tech trade show wrapped up in Japan yesterday and one late attendee is turning some heads. A Japanese company by the name of Project Vivit had gotten a new demo screen from E-ink only hours before and immediately started showing it off.

That is a 6″ color E-ink screen you’re looking at, though the exhibitors wouldn’t reveal any more details than that. It’s driven by a project board which incorporates an Epson controller chip.

Update: I’ve heard back from E-ink and that is the same Triton E-ink screen as seen elsewhere. The resolution is 300×400.

Color me unimpressed. I’ve been seeing decent quality video on consumer model ereaders for nearly a year now. The Nook Touch in particular has been a favorite of  hackers due to the fact it runs Android underneath.

Okay, seeing the video in color is kinda interesting, but in the long term it doesn’t have much use.  The low-power benefit of E-ink screens is lost when you have to refresh the screen 30 times a second. And the quality and resolution of the video is much lower than you would find on most any LCD screen.

In any case, this demo is likely not intended for the consumer market.Project Vivit’s main business is reportedly commercial signage. They plan to use the video-capable color epaper display to sell to businesses for use in commercial facilities and medical practices – not for ereaders.

via Tech-On

As my regular readers know, I am an information junky. I gather info just to collect it and because I’ve learned that the more info I pile up in one place the more I can learn from it.

I probably follow a more diverse and larger selection of RSS feeds than anyone I know, but I still feel it’s not enough. And that is why I recently added 1,300 more RSS feeds to my Google Reader account.

A couple weeks ago I was reading a Canadian blogger and he happened to get on to the topic of RSS feeds. Joe Clark is somewhat like me in that he uses a feed reader to follow quite a few different blogs. He even availed himself of a tool which let him export the list of blogs he followed. He actually follows over 1,400 blogs, but the list he posted only contains just over 1,300 RSS feeds.

I installed them last night, and now I understand why he doesn’t use Google Reader. After adding Joe’s collection of RSS feeds, I was following (at peak) 2,349 blogs, news sources, and search codes. Google Reader was not happy.

I’ve noticed that once I reached some arbitrarily large number of RSS feeds Google Reader tended to randomly:

• reload the page,
• forget to show RSS feeds with unread posts,
• misplace entire folders of RSS feeds.

I think at one point it may have told me there were 5 lights, but I could be wrong.

I’m now down to only following 2,021 RSS feeds, and I will continue to thin the collection as time goes by. I kinda have to. While stress-testing Google Reader was fun, I need it to work reliably.

But I am very glad I added all those feeds. From that huge mass I have found several dozen blogs which I am thrilled to read and occasionally link to. I even added a few new sources to this morning’s links post, and I have even more ready to add to tomorrow’s post.

This, I think, is half of the reason why I have the best link blog in digital publishing (the other half is knowing what to pick). I am always growing my source list – even beyond any reasonable need.

And that, folks, is how I do extreme reading.

P.S. If anyone know of a tool which will better handle 2k RSS feeds, please let me know.

The screen tech trade show FPD International is going on right now in Japan and the attendees are in for a treat. Japan Display Inc is currently showing off a new 7″ (1024×768) LCD screen which could present a serious challenge to E-ink’s dominance of the ereader market.

The new display incorporates a couple changes in design from the norm for LCDs, resulting in a much lower power demand.

First, it forgoes the backlight found on virtually every LCD screen. As you probably know, the backlight is often the single biggest user of battery life on any tablet.  By leaving it out this screen becomes one of the more energy efficient LCD screens in one fell swoop.

But that’s not all that this screen offers, and here’s the cool part. This display also has small amounts of sRAM incorporated into each pixel.

The other reason why LCD screens are so power intensive is that the current screens have to be constantly told to display an image. Even if the screen contents don’t change, the screen still needs to be repeatedly told to display what’s on screen. That means a controller chip somewhere inside the device is constantly running and sending a signal to the screen.

This new screen gets around the power issue by using static RAM to record the screen contents on a pixel by pixel basis. The RAM doesn’t require any power to store current state of the screen, so keeping an image on the screen requires a minimum of power. It is so low power that its usage while displaying a static image is measured in milliWatts, while regular LCD screens have power demands measured in Watts.

For example, the display on the iPad 2 draws 2.4 Watts at maximum brightness, while the Retina display on the iPad 3 draws 7 Watts at maximum brightness.

In comparison, the new screen mentioned above draws 3 mW while displaying a static image. That means that when it’s not in heavy use (reading, for example) this screen is 800 times more efficient than the one on the iPad 2.

No details have been released about the manufacturing cost, but JDI did indicate that they were ready to produce the screen now.

Update: And here’s a video showing the new screen, courtesy of DigInfo.tv.